They call this campaign BingItOn. Click at the link and you can take a blind search test that compares Google to Bing side-by-side in your own choice of searches. You get to do five searches and choose whether you like the left side, right side, or call it a draw. For the record, I took it, and it came out even for me (one of the results was a draw).

Microsoft apparently felt encouraged to do this promotion when it saw the results of an independent study. Conducted by California-based Answers Research, the study queried an online sample of nearly 1,000 people at least 18 years old, all living in the US. None of the participants in the survey knew Microsoft was involved.

Participants performed 10 searches of their own choosing, and were shown the results from both Bing and Google, side by side, with all the the branding removed. Additionally, notes Microsoft, “The test did not include ads or content in other parts of the page such as Bing’s Snapshot and Social Search panes and Google’s Knowledge Graph.” For each search, participants chose which side showed better results, or could call it a tie.

Of the participants surveyed, 57.4 percent chose Bing more often, 30.2 percent chose Google more often, and 12.4 percent didn’t prefer one over the other. (Apparently, I am among the 12.4 percent). That’s very close to the two to one preference claimed by Microsoft, but are those numbers really fair? Given that both search engines offer a certain amount of customization, one has to ask if the test truly duplicated the effect of using each engine “in the wild.” I’ve used Google a lot more than I’ve used Bing; I’d expect the former to know me better than the latter. Doesn’t that mean my search results on Google would be more relevant than my results on Bing, even if I’m using personalization features on both of them?

Chris Crum over at WebProNews points out that Microsoft is hardly breaking new ground with its BingItOn promotion. About fifteen months ago, the Blekko search engine invited everyone to play “three engine monte.” Perform a search, and you get three sets of results side by side: Bing, Google, and Blekko. Again, you don’t see the branding until after you pick the best result. Blekko still offers it, in fact; you can play three engine monte for yourself.

This may be a clever promotional move by Microsoft, but will it truly win converts? It’s hard to say. Old habits are hard to break. And if I’m right about the way personalized searches work, regular Google users may notice that Bing isn’t living up to its side of the bargain, and go back to their old friend. Bing certainly won’t get any special treatment from SEOs until they win more market share, and that’s proving to be slow going.

]]>http://www.seochat.com/c/a/msn-optimization-help/microsoft-says-bing-beats-google-2-to-1-in-blind-tests/feed/0Bing Team Builds Apps, Toohttp://www.seochat.com/c/a/msn-optimization-help/bing-team-builds-apps-too/
http://www.seochat.com/c/a/msn-optimization-help/bing-team-builds-apps-too/#commentsFri, 17 Aug 2012 08:00:05 +0000http://www.seochat.com/c/a/msn-optimization-help/bing-team-builds-apps-too/You might be surprised to hear that the team at Microsoft working on Bing does a lot more than search. True, the company’s Online Services Division (OSD) deals with its search platform and search advertising. But it also boasts hundreds of developers hard at work writing apps for other platforms.According to Mary Jo Foley, writing […]

According to Mary Jo Foley, writing for CNET, the main focus of these developers is the Windows 8 tablet, Windows Phones, and the Xbox gaming console. Their applications often include Bing and MSN data and elements. If you’ve checked out Windows 8 and seen some of the interesting apps that come with it, you’ve probably seen their work.

So what kinds of applications are we talking about? They cover news, travel, finance, weather, sports, and maps. In short, these are quintessential search-related apps, so it’s only natural that a team working in the same department as a search engine would create them. To be fair, though, this group may work in the same division, but it boasts a different name: AppEx, short for “Application Experiences.”

The AppEx team still reports to the same head as the Bing core engineering team, however: Brian MacDonald, corporate VP of Online Services. Don’t let the “corporate” part fool you; MacDonald can claim some serious applications experience. He used to head the NetDocs team, a group that was trying to create an Internet-centric office suite. This happened before Microsoft had completely embraced the Internet and the cloud, apparently, since the company killed NetDocs because it would compete with Microsoft Office. (I have to wonder what MacDonald thinks of Office 365).

The AppEx group lets Microsoft tap into the big data/cloud assets the company now possesses thanks to Bing. For example, the Bing team created a version of Bing Maps for the Windows Phone. Other apps on the horizon could tap into a cloud at the back end and content built with MSN on the front end.

According to Adam Sohn, Bing’s General Manager, in Online Services “We want to use assets we’ve built to make other Microsoft products more compelling." So it makes sense that the company would start building apps like this to enhance its various platforms, especially as mobile computing diversifies.

But the AppEx team’s work won’t be just for Microsoft platforms in the future. Foley noted that the group has already done some preliminary work on Bing apps for iPhones and iPads. Heresy? Hardly; given the popularity of those platforms, it’s more like good business sense. No doubt we’ll see more cross-platform Bing-related apps coming out of this group in the future.

]]>http://www.seochat.com/c/a/msn-optimization-help/bing-team-builds-apps-too/feed/0Bing Links Explorer: Yahoo Site Explorer Reborn?http://www.seochat.com/c/a/msn-optimization-help/bing-links-explorer-yahoo-site-explorer-reborn/
http://www.seochat.com/c/a/msn-optimization-help/bing-links-explorer-yahoo-site-explorer-reborn/#commentsMon, 09 Jul 2012 16:30:08 +0000http://www.seochat.com/c/a/msn-optimization-help/bing-links-explorer-yahoo-site-explorer-reborn/It doesn’t quite offer all of the functionality of the late, lamented Yahoo Site Explorer, but Bing Links Explorer gives fans of the free tool lots of reasons to rejoice. If you have a Bing Webmaster Tools account, you can access the features of this new service right now.If you don’t have such an account, […]

If you don’t have such an account, you can sign up for one at http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster; you’ll need a Windows Live ID, which is free to set up. Now if you’ve never used Yahoo Site Explorer, you may be wondering what all the fuss is about. Before it was closed, YSE was perhaps the only free tool you could use to examine the backlinks accumulated by websites other than your own…including your competitors. It provided other functions as well, that in many cases you’d have to pay for elsewhere.

Sujan Patel offers a list of Bing Links Explorer’s features, and explains how to use them for research and competitive intelligence. If you like to discover these things for yourself, fire up Bing Webmaster Tools, and then go to the “Diagnostic & Tools” menu located on the left-hand sidebar to find and access the “Links Explorer” feature.

You can start playing with Bing Links Explorer by entering the URL you want to investigate in the first search field. You can enter a root domain or a sub-page – and best of all, it doesn’t even need to be on your site! The tool will return a condensed list of external links going to that URL, one per linking website. But if you want more information, you can apply various filters to this search.

Say you own examplesite.com and bloggerinyourfield.com has reviewed a few of your products. Want to see all of the backlinks he’s given you? Enter his URL into the “Filter by site” option.

Worried that your anchor text isn’t varied enough to look natural? You can use the search field for anchor text. Just put specific versions of the anchor text you use in this field and click to re-run the search.

Do you want to check the internal link network of a site? Use the “Source” filter to change your options. By default, Bing Links Explorer returns external links when you enter a URL, but you can tell it to deliver external links, or both kinds of links.

I haven’t covered all of the features here; I figure I might as well leave you a few to discover on your own. But I think you can already see the potential. The simplest, most obvious thing you can do is put in your competitor’s website and track down all of his external links. As an example, Patel suggested that Amazon might want to find out which websites link to Rackspace – like Amazon, a big name in the cloud storage space. In this example, sites that link to Rackspace might be link building candidates for Amazon. “After all, you link to our competitor,” Amazon might say; “why not link to us?” (You can tell why I’m not in sales!).

The best part, of course, is that you can get all of this competitive intelligence for free. Have you started using Bing Links Explorer? What do you plan to do with it? Please share in the comments below!

]]>http://www.seochat.com/c/a/msn-optimization-help/bing-links-explorer-yahoo-site-explorer-reborn/feed/0Bing Local Basicshttp://www.seochat.com/c/a/msn-optimization-help/bing-local-basics/
http://www.seochat.com/c/a/msn-optimization-help/bing-local-basics/#commentsTue, 31 Jan 2012 08:00:05 +0000http://www.seochat.com/c/a/msn-optimization-help/bing-local-basics/You run a local business, and you claimed your Google Local listing so searchers would see your website. That’s a start, but with Bing and Yahoo together holding more than a quarter of the search market in the US, you’re still leaving money on the table. Fortunately, you can easily get onto Bing Local by […]

]]>You run a local business, and you claimed your Google Local listing so searchers would see your website. That’s a start, but with Bing and Yahoo together holding more than a quarter of the search market in the US, you’re still leaving money on the table. Fortunately, you can easily get onto Bing Local by following a few simple steps.

As Chris Silver Smith explains at Search Engine Land, Microsoft’s Bing Business Portal features a “beta” interface through which you handle your business details. It replaces the Bing Local Listing Center. If you want some information about the service before adding your business, you can read the FAQ.

To star using the interface, you’ll need to find your listing. Bing Business Portal will ask you to enter your business name (required), address, city, state, and zip code, and then press the search button to see if Bing already has information about your business. If you enter only your business name, be aware that Bing will insist that you also enter either your city AND state, or your zip code.

Once you’ve entered this information, Bing will return a listing to you if it finds one that matches. You can then click the claim button. If it doesn’t, you can add a new listing. Smith notes that “having a business owner claim a listing helps to validate the information and establish that the business is active, helping increase ‘trust ranking’ factors.” Remember that search engines hate to show stale information to searchers – and businesses fail all the time. If a business owner has claimed their listing, it may show the search engine that the business is active, and could lead to a more prominent position in the search results.

Once you’ve claimed your listing, you need to check the contact information it displays. Make sure it’s correct. At a minimum, it needs to include your name, address, and phone number, in addition to your website’s URL. If you choose to include an email address, treat it professionally – check and answer the messages it receives at least once a day. Otherwise, customers will think you’re ignoring them, and go somewhere else.

Next, if you can, you should at least consider adding an image to your listing. Smith notes that for Bing Local searches, “higher-ranking businesses appear to more frequently have images associated with their listings!” He was careful to state that this could simply be due to the fact that listings with images are always claimed listings, and they could be ranking higher for that fact alone. Correlation does not equal causation, after all. Smith uses a Bing search on “intellectual property attorneys Chicago, Il” as an example. The first listing past the ads is a box with a map and five options; when I clicked through, I noticed that the top two and the fifth ones included images.

As a potential customer, I think I’d be more inclined to take the next step with a business that includes an image. If users conduct a search on Bing Local (rather than a general web search), those images actually show up next to the relevant listings, drawing the eye and making you stand out. As a searcher, if I don’t know any of the businesses listed in my search, and distance isn’t a huge factor, I start looking for anything that catches my eye and makes it stand out. Including an image is one approach that can help attract eyeballs; there are others you can use as well.

{mospagebreak title=Be Eye-Catching}

Smith notes that Bing Local business profiles include a small red “open” sign icon, and he thinks it’s possible that “businesses might be a little more likely to rank better during times when they list themselves as being open, particularly in mobile search.” I haven’t seen this icon in the wild myself, but that could be because the businesses for which I’ve searched haven’t included their hours of operation. This might be an argument to include yours; that icon will surely catch a searcher’s eyes!

Other things will catch a searcher’s eyes as well. If you’re a restaurant, for example, you can include a menu. You can also integrate with OpenTable if you take reservations. This will enable a “reservations” link to appear on your profile page in Bing.

You can also add deals to your local listing. Smith notes that Bing seems to be picking up Groupon offers and adding them to local listings. They’re not the only ones showing up, either. In my local area, we receive Valpak mailings once a month that include coupons for local businesses; they’ve recently started doing online coupons as well. Ritter’s Ice Cream showed a link to one of these when I clicked on the option for “deals” under their Bing Local listing – of course, I searched for ice cream locally on Bing purely as research for this article! If you’d like a little more certainty that a link to deals will show up for your local listing, you can set something up through Bing Group Deals directly within the BBP interface.

If you want to be spotted as much as possible, check the categories under which your business is listed. Make sure they’re correct for your business, and add more that make sense. Smith also suggests that you add “Specialties,” as Bing seems to treat them like categories or subcategories. So if you’re a photographer, you may be able to add wedding photography as a specialty. (I haven’t had the chance to play with the interface myself, so you’ll need to experiment).

Smith recommends that you develop local citation sources to show up well, such as YP.com, Superpages.com, Yahoo! Local, Manta, Judy’s Book, and others. He believes that vertical directories may also work, so get yourself listed in one that’s appropriate to your business: FindLaw.com, Contractors.com, etc. I would further suggest, when possible, that you try to get rated and reviewed on sites such as Citysearch, TripAdvisor, Judy’s Book, and others; Bing clearly pulls from these sites. In my ice cream experiment, a star rating appeared below several businesses next to a link; when I clicked through, Bing showed me the reviews, with a note on who wrote them and where they appeared. In at least some cases, I could even click through to read the full review.

Of course, some of your customers might have already reviewed your business. Now that you can be found more easily in Bing Local, you may see more customers, more reviews, more business – and more profit. And you can get all this from a small investment of your time with Bing. Good luck!

]]>http://www.seochat.com/c/a/msn-optimization-help/bing-local-basics/feed/0Personalized Social Search Still Years Awayhttp://www.seochat.com/c/a/msn-optimization-help/personalized-social-search-still-years-away/
http://www.seochat.com/c/a/msn-optimization-help/personalized-social-search-still-years-away/#commentsThu, 15 Dec 2011 17:00:05 +0000http://www.seochat.com/c/a/msn-optimization-help/personalized-social-search-still-years-away/Ever since their inception, search engines have sought to deliver better and better results to their users. Just a few years ago, they started defining “better” as “more personalized.” With social sites gaining prominence, how long will it be before search engines incorporate your specific social profile into your search results?To a very limited extent, […]

To a very limited extent, it’s already happening. But if former Bing product lead Mark Johnson is right, it’s going to be a long time before we see much more progress in that area. “If every user that comes [to Bing or Google] is getting a personalized experience based on Facebook data, based on the web graph, based on the social graph – holy crap, that’s a lot of processes to do,” Johnson notes. He’s quoted by Austin Carr in an article for Fast Company.

To Johnson, it’s a matter of economics. Interpreting all of those social signals would involve huge server costs. Neither Bing nor Google would be willing to pay those costs without seeing “significant increases in quality of search results,” according to Johnson. Server costs would probably need to drop pretty dramatically before the economics of adding social signals in a more personalized way to search started making sense.

Here’s the problem: search engines typically try to precache queries. PC Mag defines precaching as downloading data ahead of time in anticipation of its use. “For example, when a Web page is retrieved, the pages that users typically jump to when they leave that page might be precached in anticipation,” PC Mag explains. When a user sends a query to a search engine that it has seen before, it retrieves at least some precached results, for the sake of speed and conservation of resources.

But imagine what would happen if search engines had to take both your personalized search profile and your social graph into consideration. Since many people post regularly to Facebook, Twitter, and other social sites, Bing and Google wouldn’t be able to just retrieve the same results they’ve used before. To deliver the best results, they’d have to recalculate everything every time someone searched. As Johnson notes, “if you have to go to the server to calculate every single query, your front-end costs go up. If Bing or Google sees a query that it’s never seen before, and had to actually calculate a result on the fly, we’re talking about using time on hundreds of thousands of servers.”

While Google does see its fair share of queries it has never seen before, the percentage of new queries is not as high as you might think. According to Google’s internal data “We’ve never seen 16% of the queries we see every day.” Because of the economics involved, it’s fair to assume that Google uses precaching to put up results for the other 84 percent of the queries it receives, and it’s likely Bing does the same thing.

{mospagebreak title=Personalized Social Search Still the Dream}

So how are Google and Microsoft proceeding? They both think that the search industry must incorporate social factors into results in the future. But so far they can only accomplish this at a basic level, by annotating results. For example, if I search on Bing or Google and one of my friends has shared something relevant to my search, I might see an indication of this next to the link. This is why getting shared on Twitter or “liked” on Facebook is becoming more important.

Bing director Stefan Weitz hopes to bring even more social signals into search. As he told Fast Company back in May, “ There are more signals than just ‘Likes.’ There are tweets, check-ins – when I’m at Spur restaurant in Seattle, and I say it’s the best lamb tartare and post that on Yelp, that’s a signal as well. There’s a world where all these social and personal signals – whatever you want to call them – are consumed and indexed and made sense of.”

It’s not getting the social data itself that’s the problem, though; it’s sifting through it, or consuming and indexing and making sense of it, to use Weitz’s words. As Johnson observes, “Having data alone does not give you an analysis of that data. I think that’s a problem with a lot of advertisers – sure, they’re sitting on mounds of data. But they don’t know what to do with it.” And when you consider that whatever you do with it must be cost-effective and beneficial to someone who’s not willing to wait very long for an answer, well, you have an overwhelming problem on your hands.

And while Microsoft and Google are the only companies that have the resources and skills to potentially mine the social data and add the information gleaned from it to search results, Johnson doesn’t think this is going to happen soon. It isn’t simply a matter of tweaking the algorithms, and even if it were, “Tweaking the algorithms is not simple!” Johnson emphasized. “The outside world makes it seem like it’s so easy to just ‘bubble it up to the top.”

Johnson knows whereof he speaks. He’s not only the former project lead on Bing, but he has a number of search startups under his belt. These include SideStep (acquired by Kayak for $180 million), Kosmix (bought by Wal-Mart for $300 million) and PowerSet, a search engine purchased by Microsoft in 2008 for $100 million. Johnson’s latest venture, Zite, focuses on content delivery on mobile devices.

And yet, back in May Weitz told Fast Company that personalized social search was "not 10 years, not five years away, it’s a couple years away–tops–where social is literally so imbued into the experience that it’s just another ranking factor like anything else." Time alone will tell who is right, but given how differently many people use social sites, I’m inclined to think the problem isn’t as easy to solve as Weitz seems to be implying. Of course, if it really does lead to better search results, I wouldn’t mind being proven wrong.

]]>http://www.seochat.com/c/a/msn-optimization-help/personalized-social-search-still-years-away/feed/0Bing Turns Grinch for Cyber Mondayhttp://www.seochat.com/c/a/msn-optimization-help/bing-turns-grinch-for-cyber-monday/
http://www.seochat.com/c/a/msn-optimization-help/bing-turns-grinch-for-cyber-monday/#commentsThu, 01 Dec 2011 08:00:06 +0000http://www.seochat.com/c/a/msn-optimization-help/bing-turns-grinch-for-cyber-monday/If you were searching for holiday shopping deals this Monday, I hope you weren’t using Bing. As it turns out, Microsoft’s search engine removed many sites specifically focused on publicizing Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals from its results. Did Bing become a Grinch, or is something more sinister going on?Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land […]

Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land provides a comprehensive report of what appears to be going on. It’s well worth reading if you enjoy drinking your egg nog flavored with a dose of real-life irony. I kept shaking my head, wondering what the folks at Microsoft were thinking.

Take, for instance, the website CyberMonday.com. This site was removed from Bing’s index, supposedly due to thin content. But here’s the thing: the site is run by the National Retail Federation’s digital division. Microsoft is one of this division’s member companies – and the division, named Shop.org, is the one that coined the term Cyber Monday about six years ago. I don’t know about you, but to me, that’s enough to raise a “something’s not right” flag.

Google, on the other hand, seems to like CyberMonday.com. The site appears high among its top ten results for a search on the phrase “cyber monday.” That’s particularly interesting since Google has gone on record with its Panda updates as fighting a battle against websites that offer thin content.

Sullivan notes that CyberMonday.com isn’t the only holiday sales website Bing excluded from its index. He notes that Bing also removed a whole assortment of websites consolidating Black Friday deals from its index as well. However, somewhat suspiciously, a link to Microsoft’s own Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals page appears at the top of Bing’s search results for Cyber Monday, right below the sponsored listings. Damningly, Sullivan backs this up with screen shots.

Could Microsoft actually be playing this crude of a game – eliminating rivals from the Bing search index to promote their own service at the height of the holiday season? When Sullivan asked the company what was going on, it claimed that it was merely trying to improve results for its users. Bing told Sullivan that “Consistent with our guidance to site owners, websites that seem to rely mostly on affiliate content or that offer only thin content often don’t deliver the value searchers are looking for and may be demoted or removed from our index.”

Furthermore, this approach supposedly isn’t new to Bing. Bing said “It’s nothing new, and follows guidance we’ve given on our webmaster site. We don’t have any specifics to share.” Sullivan, on the other hand, went digging for specifics at the link to “guidance to site owners” that Bing provided, and found…not exactly what you would expect.

{mospagebreak title=A Well-Hidden Policy}

I followed the link that Bing gave Sullivan, as he posted it in his article. Like Sullivan, I was surprised and disappointed to see that, instead of going to some well-organized document that lists publisher guidelines, it went to the Bing Webmaster Central blog. Sullivan went through the posts to see if he could find any news that thin content could get you banned. The closest he got was an entry dating to August that happens to cover SEO techniques. It does talk unfavorably about those who aggregate content from multiple sources on one page, explaining why “content from articles or syndication cannot stand alone and rank successfully.” But it doesn’t say anywhere on that page that such content could get your site removed from Bing’s index.

Sullivan further notes that Bing’s Guidelines for Successful Indexing also doesn’t provide guidance on this issue — and with a title like that, one would certainly expect it to. But it took going to a section of Bing aimed at searchers rather than publishers for Sullivan to find a hint that thin content could get a site removed from the search engine. It falls under a definition of spam, and it reads in part: “Some pages captured in our index turn out to be pages of little or no value to users…[and] include only advertisements…and no or only superficial content relevant to the subject of the search…we might remove such pages from the index altogether…” As Sullivan noted, this turned up in a place publishers might easily miss.

Despite Bing’s response to Sullivan, he notes that this feels like a very new change, and one that seems targeted to holiday shopping deal websites. And here comes more irony: Bing is applying this penalty sitewide rather than to individual pages, exactly as Google has done for Panda – and exactly as Bing has criticized Google for doing! Sullivan cites an interview in which Bing Director Stefan Weitz noted that they tested Google’s approach of delisting an entire site shortly after Google did it with JC Penney, when the New York Times broke a story about the retailer seriously gaming search results. Specifically, Bing banned JC Penney internally and then tested it on humans, trying to find out whether the results looked better or worse after the change. Their testers said that it looked worse, because they expected to see JC Penney for certain results.

But here’s the money quote: “We have page level classifiers tha tlook at every page we index that attempt to discern a quality score. It looks at things like reading levels, number of ads versus content, length of words, length of page, all those standard things, and some not so standard things as well,” said Weitz. So Bing thinks it’s important to rank each page on its own merits, and has the technology to do so. There’s no apparent reason for it to have totally removed these holiday deal finding sites from the index – and yet it did.

Now, of course, if those sites are truly bad, they shouldn’t be in Bing’s index. But Sullivan used screen shots to show that there wasn’t any significant difference between the sites banned from Bing’s index and the ones that Bing ranked high in its results for holiday shopping phrases like “black friday ads.” Even worse, one of Bing’s top 10 results for that phrase points to a page at Yahoo Deals with Black Friday ads – and the ads on that page specifically come from BlackFriday2011.com, a site that is itself banned by Bing. As Sullivan notes, “Now that’s irony. BlackFriday2011.com is deemed too thin for Bing, but a page that points to all that thin content? That’s apparently thick enough to keep.”

The repercussions of Bing’s actions, though, could go well beyond the holiday shopping season. You see, Microsoft has accused Google, through membership in and funding of groups such as FairSearch, of manipulating search results to favor its own content and lock out competitors. Now Microsoft itself seems to be doing what it has accused Google of doing. With a number of the members of FairSearch actually engaged in a legal antitrust battle with Google over the issue, Microsoft’s behavior surely won’t help them build their case.

]]>http://www.seochat.com/c/a/msn-optimization-help/bing-turns-grinch-for-cyber-monday/feed/0Microsoft AdCenter Now Supports Negative Exact Matchhttp://www.seochat.com/c/a/msn-optimization-help/microsoft-adcenter-now-supports-negative-exact-match/
http://www.seochat.com/c/a/msn-optimization-help/microsoft-adcenter-now-supports-negative-exact-match/#commentsFri, 18 Nov 2011 15:30:09 +0000http://www.seochat.com/c/a/msn-optimization-help/microsoft-adcenter-now-supports-negative-exact-match/Microsoft added a long-awaited feature to its adCenter search engine advertising service. Negative Exact Match, arriving as part of a larger set of improvements for adCenter customers, will allow users to more precisely control which of their ads searchers will see.Crosby Grant reported on the news for Search Engine Land. You can also find Microsoft’s […]

Crosby Grant reported on the news for Search Engine Land. You can also find Microsoft’s own blog post by Tina Kelleher on its adCenter Blog, explaining the change. The timing could hardly be more perfect. Some marketers might have wished for more time to prepare to before the rush of shoppers searching for Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals, but it shouldn’t take them long to get the hang of the new feature. After all, users of Google’s AdWords search advertising service have been able to make negative exact matches for quite some time.

If you use adCenter’s web interface, you can already take advantage of its new features, though Kelleher notes that you’ll need to upgrade to version 8.1.111 when you see the upgrade prompt in your tool. Keep in mind that this negative keyword feature only works at the ad group and campaign levels; the company stopped supporting keyword level negative keywords. But don’t worry; users won’t be left completely out in the cold. “In order to make this change a seamless experience for Desktop users, you can migrate your keyword level negative keywords to ad group or campaign level using the Negative Keyword Migration Wizard or in adCenter web UI copy and paste your list of keyword-level negative keywords into an Excel or .CSV file, then import the list at either the ad group or campaign level,” Kelleher explained.

At Search Engine Land, Grant is not overly concerned about keyword level negative keywords going away at adCenter. He noted that most advertisers try hard not to use them anyway. “The non-cumulative nature of adCenter’s negatives – adding a keyword-level negative would then ignore any Campaign or AdGroup negatives – along with the character limit (10,000 characters) have been practical barriers to managing keyword-level negatives for most advertisers,” he explained.

Grant also reported that this update will not include negative broad match. That should be good news for at least one poster on Microsoft’s Advertising forums. Back in September on the adCenter Advertiser Support forums, a thread focused on negative exact match came up. AlphaProject emphasized the need for a negative exact match with an example featuring two search queries, “ford mustang” and “2005 ford mustang.” As the first one converts poorly but the second one converts very well, AlphaProject wanted to be able to filter out the first one while keeping the second one. Negative exact match allows users to do exactly this.

{mospagebreak title=How Negative Exact Match Works}

Grant gave an example of how he uses negative exact matches to help target his ads more precisely. You can do the same thing, and you’ll probably end up with happier customers in the bargain. Grant’s example focused on keyword ads for mountain bikes. He noted that he liked to run ad groups that look like this:

Terrain(Mountain) Type(Bike)

Terrain(Mountain) Type(Bike) Accessory(Tires)

Someone searching for a mountain bike would not be interested in seeing an ad for mountain bike tires, since the bikes already come with tires. Likewise, someone searching for mountain bike tires already has a mountain bike, and doesn’t want another one; they just want tires for the one they own. As Grant points out, he can already prevent his ads for mountain bike tires from popping up for searches on mountain bikes: “We just add ‘tires’ as a negative-phrase match to the [first] AdGroup,” he explained.

Up until now, however, preventing ads for mountain bikes from popping up on searches for mountain bike tires when using adCenter wasn’t doable, and “leaks” were inevitable. With adCenter’s new Negative Exact Match capability, those leaks can now be prevented. “We can simply add a negative-exact match for ‘mountain bike’ into the [second] AdGroup, and voila!” Grant wrote. No more leakage, and no more potential customers staring in annoyance at your irrelevant ad.

One nice point about this feature is that a number of advertisers had told Microsoft that they’d wanted it; this is a good example of the company following through. “Microsoft says the adCenter team is doing their best to implement the features advertisers want the most,” Grant noted, and in his opinion, the introduction of negative exact match provides strong evidence that the statement is more than just words. Microsoft also cares about getting it right, as Grant said that the company told him the feature had been in beta with certain advertisers. Don’t bother trying to find out who, though, as they almost certainly can’t talk about it anyway. A company running closed betas of that sort usually requires the testers to sign a non-disclosure agreement.

The wider implication here is that if Microsoft’s adCenter lacks certain features that you’d really like to use, it’s worth telling the company that you want to see it working on them. You can even go directly to the Microsoft Advertising adCenter Feature Suggestion Forum and type a suggestion into the box. Microsoft notes that “Related suggestions may appear in the results area as you type, and you might find that your suggestion has already been submitted.” If that’s the case, you can add a comment and vote for the suggestion, letting Microsoft know how important it is to you to see the feature added. Under the suggestion titles, you’ll often find a word as to their status (such as “under review,” “started,” “planned,” etc.), and a more complete note from a Microsoft Advertising administrator that lets you know exactly where they are with the suggested feature. For a company known for being relatively opaque, this approach is remarkably transparent, and I think it’s worth encouraging – so if there are any adCenter features you’d really like to see, be sure to let your voice be heard at Microsoft.

]]>http://www.seochat.com/c/a/msn-optimization-help/microsoft-adcenter-now-supports-negative-exact-match/feed/0Mozilla Releases New Version of Firefox for Bing Usershttp://www.seochat.com/c/a/msn-optimization-help/mozilla-releases-new-version-of-firefox-for-bing-users/
http://www.seochat.com/c/a/msn-optimization-help/mozilla-releases-new-version-of-firefox-for-bing-users/#commentsThu, 27 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000http://www.seochat.com/c/a/msn-optimization-help/mozilla-releases-new-version-of-firefox-for-bing-users/In this article we look at the newly announced Firefox with Bing from Mozilla.Building off the partnership that kicked off last year, Mozilla and Microsoft have just announced the existence of another joint venture with the rollout of the Firefox with Bing browser. As the name suggests, the new version of Mozilla’s popular browser uses […]

Building off the partnership that kicked off last year, Mozilla and Microsoft have just announced the existence of another joint venture with the rollout of the Firefox with Bing browser. As the name suggests, the new version of Mozilla’s popular browser uses Microsoft Bing as its search engine of choice in the search box and AwesomeBar. In addition, it sets the default home page to Bing.com.

Mozilla officially announced Firefox with Bing in a short blog post. Microsoft’s Bing team did the same, noting that they were “excited to make it even easier for members of the Mozilla Firefox community to use Bing.” Bing fans previously had the option to use Microsoft’s search engine by default through the Bing Search for Firefox add-on. Adjusting Firefox’s configuration settings was another option as well, but the all-inclusive download that is now available is seen as much more of a user-friendly alternative.

Firefox with Bing does not mark the first time that Microsoft has teamed up with Mozilla. When Firefox 4 debuted in October 2010, it came equipped with a variety of search box options to give users alternatives to Google. Microsoft’s Bing search engine was just one of the options, with Yahoo, eBay, Wikipedia, and Amazon product search also thrown into the mix. Bing had just over one year on the market at the time, and Microsoft saw the opportunity as a way to get expand its search engine’s presence.

Microsoft can only hope that the introduction of Firefox with Bing will help to increase the popularity of its search engine. Since its launch in the summer of 2009, Bing has generated $5.5 billion in losses for Microsoft, and recent reports show that it now loses the company an average of one billion dollars per quarter. Bing is currently the default search engine on Microsoft’s Windows Phone and RIM’s BlackBerry phones, as well as the Internet Explorer browser. Even Internet Explorer’s status as the most widely used browser in the world has not helped to boost Bing’s market share to a respectable level, however, as it sits behind Google, Yahoo, and China’s Baidu search engine with just 4 percent of the global market.

Firefox with Bing can be downloaded by visiting firefoxwithbing.com. Users with Firefox already downloaded can get the enhanced browser by installing the aforementioned Bing Search for Firefox add-on.

]]>http://www.seochat.com/c/a/msn-optimization-help/mozilla-releases-new-version-of-firefox-for-bing-users/feed/0Ballmer Blunt at Web 2.0 Summithttp://www.seochat.com/c/a/msn-optimization-help/ballmer-blunt-at-web-2-0-summit/
http://www.seochat.com/c/a/msn-optimization-help/ballmer-blunt-at-web-2-0-summit/#commentsThu, 20 Oct 2011 08:30:08 +0000http://www.seochat.com/c/a/msn-optimization-help/ballmer-blunt-at-web-2-0-summit/Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer never has any trouble telling people what he really thinks. Attendees of the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco on Tuesday discovered this all over again when John Battelle interviewed Ballmer there.Not surprisingly, Yahoo was near the top of Battelle’s list of questions. The software giant tried to purchase the company […]

Not surprisingly, Yahoo was near the top of Battelle’s list of questions. The software giant tried to purchase the company a few years ago, but was rebuffed. That rejection looks foolish now, in the wake of the beleaguered search engine’s woes. So how does Ballmer feel about it now?

In a word, relieved. When Battelle asked Ballmer if he was glad that Yahoo didn’t take his company up on its unsolicited $47.5 billion bid back in 2008, Ballmer laughed and said “You know, times change. When you ask any CEO [that type of question] after the market has fallen apart, it’s ‘hallelujah.’” He added, “Sometimes, you’re lucky.” This comment is interesting in light of reports that Microsoft is putting together another bid to purchase Yahoo, with the help of at least one private equity firm as a partner in the bid. Almost certainly, this time around, the software giant will not bid quite so high as it did last time.

Even so, Ballmer showed a diplomatic side, saying that Yahoo “still has a lot going for them.” After all, Microsoft’s technology powers Yahoo’s search site now; in return, the software firm gets a respectable share of the search engine’s advertising revenues. According to Yahoo’s recent financial report, that deal has been extended through 2013.

Ballmer got nastier when the topic turned to Google’s and Apple’s smartphones. While he admitted that Apple has done “some nice things…with Siri [a speech-activated virtual assistant],” he noted that Microsoft has “been doing the same kinds of things for years.” When Battelle asked Ballmer why a customer should buy a Windows phone instead of an iPhone, Ballmer claimed the Windows Phone 7 offers a superior user interface; “it’s not a sea of icons,” but puts the user’s information “front and center” instead.

But Ballmer reserved his strongest venom for Google’s Android. "You don’t need to be a computer scientist to use a Windows phone. I think you do to use an Android phone," he said.

When Battelle turned to the question of whether Microsoft will create its own smartphone hardware, however, Ballmer turned uncharacteristically coy. If Microsoft did enter this market, it would be competing directly with Apple in one of the latter’s strongest areas – and quite possibly with Google, if the search engine’s purchase of Motorola Mobility clears antitrust hurdles. Ballmer tried to dodge the question by noting simply that his company is working “very hard with manufacturers to make sure there is a wide range of Windows 8 products." When pressed specifically by Battelle as to whether Microsoft would build its own phone, Ballmer answered with a laugh and a vague “We’ve been focused on building hardware innovation, and we will continue to do so," which could be interpreted any one of a number of ways. Sometimes, Ballmer isn’t so blunt after all.

]]>http://www.seochat.com/c/a/msn-optimization-help/ballmer-blunt-at-web-2-0-summit/feed/0Bing Bleeding Billions from Microsofthttp://www.seochat.com/c/a/msn-optimization-help/bing-bleeding-billions-from-microsoft/
http://www.seochat.com/c/a/msn-optimization-help/bing-bleeding-billions-from-microsoft/#commentsFri, 23 Sep 2011 08:30:08 +0000http://www.seochat.com/c/a/msn-optimization-help/bing-bleeding-billions-from-microsoft/Microsoft keeps saying that they’ll take market share from Google and start turning a profit. After all this time, though, one has to wonder when it will happen. Since the software giant launched Bing in 2009, it has been losing more than $400,000 per hour to its search unit.I can’t make up figures like this; […]

I can’t make up figures like this; I’m not nearly that good at math. Check out David Angotti’s item over at Search Engine Journal for the details. He got his basic numbers from CNN Money. However you slice them, though, they aren’t pretty.

Here’s the basics: Microsoft has lost $5.5 billion on Bing since it launched the search engine in June 2009. But it gets worse, as Microsoft has been trying to get a handle on the Internet for a while, and failing. Their online services division is a consistent money-loser. The company started breaking out the division’s finances two years before launching Bing, back in 2007. Since that time, the company has $9 billion in red ink for that unit.

Okay, we all know you have to invest and probably lose some money in order to gain market share, right? And hasn’t Bing been gaining market share against big bad Google? Um, not really. When Bing came on the scene, Google held 65 percent of the search market. It now holds 64.8 percent. In other words, Google’s market share has gone down a whopping two-tenths of a percent thanks to Bing’s efforts.

Now this doesn’t mean that Bing hasn’t grown its own market share. Microsoft’s search engine went from just under eight and a half percent of the search market at launch to close to 15 percent today. That market share has to come from somewhere; if it didn’t come from Google, where did it come from? If you guessed Yahoo and AOL, give yourself a gold star. When you consider that Yahoo’s search is now powered by Bing, the ugly truth comes clear: much of Microsoft’s share growth came from cannibalizing its partner.

Microsoft isn’t in the search game to lose, though, so what does it plan to do about this problem? Qi Lu, Microsoft’s President of Online Services, said in a speech that the company will improve search by “reorganizing the Web.” He pointed out that Bing can work with Facebook and search social streams, which “gives us new scenarios to help users discover.” He also pointed to partnerships with other companies and a focus on helping users complete tasks online.

CNN Money gave an example of that new focus by noting that “a search for ‘Mariners tickets’ will display links to upcoming games and a map of Seattle’s Safeco Field showing fans where tickets are available. A search for flight information will tell you when the best day is to purchase a plane ticket. Searching for ‘digital camera’ will display images of cameras that can be filtered, sorted and compared.”

Microsoft is not trying to “out-Google Google,” as Lu put it. They’re trying to change the game by getting past the classic ten blue links and making search more useful. The question is, with all of the changes and innovations Google has made, has the search giant already gotten there first? After all, you don’t Bing something online; you Google it. Some analysts predict that Bing will gradually gain market share over the next three or four years and become profitable. One has to wonder, though, if Microsoft can wait that long.